Prohibitionists like to blame legal cannabis for everything from rising crime to our national mental health dilemma. The truth is just the opposite, argues Katherine Mangu-Ward.
I lived in Denver when weed was legalized. First it destroyed downtown. It attracted all the wrong kinds - homeless/addicted moved there in droves. My son’s 13 year old friends sat at my kitchen table and told me weed is harmless (there goes all the good the DARE program did). Now we have the walking (fentanyl) dead and homeless encampments. So fun.
1. Whoever is over 50 years old should not really have a say. If you experimented marijuana back in your youth, the products currently available are way more potent than what you smoked. So no, it is not harmless.
2. There is no doubt excessive usage can trigger schizophrenia, and especially among teenage boys. The pro marijuana may judge the risk small, just go and talk to parents who have now schizophrenic kids . I have 2 close examples in my family and circle of friends . The young men will never come back to normal and have been living like zombie since then with the need to be supported at all times by their family and community.
3. I live in NYC. The smell of marijuana is now at every corner of the city. Especially in Times Square. Again this is the tyranny of the minority. For the 10-20% who want to smoke marijuana at any time of the day and any place, the rest of the population has to bow.
The statement that, "It is essentially impossible to overdose on marijuana" is patently false. I am a pediatric hospitalist and I have taken care of teens who have had psychotic breaks or presented with seizures from marijuana use. I am also seeing toddlers and young children who come in with seizures and altered mental status from ingesting a stray gummie that looks an awful lot like candy. Persistent vomiting from habitual marijuana use in teens is common. Last year, I took care of a baby who stopped breathing. We cannot definitely prove causation but mom was using THC for anxiety and breastfeeding the baby.
I am not opposed to marijuana use in consenting adults but decriminalization has not been good for children's health.
We commonly confuse association with causation. Cannabis use is likely one of many markers of a far more generalized failure of a society more than a cause of it. When parents, families, schools, governments, and media all fail in their responsibilities pathology becomes the norm. That void creates a market for every stupid compulsive behavior humans can conceive. Parents who failed to engender self-sufficiency, mental toughness, and accountability in their offspring have spawned hordes of dysfunctional beings prone to jump into one rabbit hole after another , a failure amplified and abetted by society's feckless foundational institutions. Whether pathologic dependence on social media, gaming obsessions, sexual obsession, identity extremism, or drugs, it all originates in the same place: horribly inadequate humans incapable of strength. As long as people's reason to exist can be reduced to limbic dopamine surges , there will be ever-growing demands for sensate triggers to stimulate the pleasure centers of their non-cortical brains.
I believe the basic question is different. The tradeoff is between the effects of the drug and the effects of arrest/incarceration. Also the tremendous burden of expense on the police as well as taxpayers. Certainly there is harm from the drug in some cases, there is 100% certainly that there is harm from the effects of criminalizing it. There can be no controlled study of criminalizing it. If people are passionate about making it illegal why aren't they equally passionate or more passionate about eliminating alcohol use? If prohibition didn't work for alcohol why believe it will work for Marijuana when it didn't work before? Eventually the government will make sure that all marijuana is legally taxed. Maybe not in our lifetime but soon.
Even before I read Katherine Mangu-Ward's rebuttal, the flaws in this column were so painfully obvious. Barr & Walters enjoy their cocktail parties but cannot justify (morally, constitutionally, or financially) the expenditure of millions of taxpayer dollars to prosecute, incarcerate and ruin the lives of people whose "crime" is that they prefer the dreamy creativeness of toking to the slobbering tipsiness of drinking. Either they should advocate that we outlaw alcohol and tobacco, or they should at least begin their statements with "I know I am a total hypocrite, but I believe...."
There's been a raft of studies that connect high potency marijuana with schizophrenia in young men. Zero mention of that in the article except for a hasty hand wave: "there is now a vigorous debate about how to separate correlation from causation when it comes to the relationship between marijuana use and mental illness".
1. Weed should be legal at all levels, full stop. Given that alcohol is legal, it’s hypocritical to criminalize weed.
2. HOWEVER, we need to put weed in the same bucket as alcohol. It’s fun, it’s recreational, it is NOT medicine! And just like society is not responsible if you drink too much, neither is society responsible if you’re high all the time. We need to stop trying to legislate away stupidity.
Whatever the arguments for or against, there is no space for weed in cities. Nowadays, the noxious smell gets everywhere, including apartment buildings and green spaces. Being able to breathe normal air is a fundamental human right.
I live in Michigan and voted to legalize weed. I’ve regretted it ever since. It’s made Michigan smelly, you can’t go to a high school basketball or football game without sitting in a stench of skunk. When you’re driving down the road on a nice spring day with your windows down and that’s all you can smell it’s disgusting. Dispensaries everywhere. My son was in a car accident where a woman ran a light and hit him and reeked of weed at the scene. Was anything done? Nope.
Everyone should Google “Menominee, MI and weed” and see what these pot companies are doing.
Also, someone at the Free Press should do a deep dive on these pot companies. They do a full court press in the towns they want to put their stores in and try to get people to vote it in. Even if the town votes it down it has to be by a large margin (Maybe 75%) and if it’s lower they can keep pestering the town and eventually bring a lawsuit to force the town to accept it. A town called Rochester near Detroit just went through this. Thankfully enough residents voted it down.
What happened to all the adults in the room. It started when the constant pressure of the "Make Weed Legal" leaders made a brilliant business move and said nobody is against a medicine that can help people. Lets do some dubious research and eventually with papers in hand snowed enough people to have it be called MEDICAL / Medicinal marijuana and crowed it is desperately needed to help people. So that opened the door exactly the way they wanted, just get that foot in the door. Yes just what America needed. America the most pill taking and drug taking group of people on earth. Fast forward the learning curve and eventually the real damage of smoking got to the people and look how smoking is viewed today. The health cost alone beside the cost to individuals, companies and families from the damage caused by smoking is staggering. So let us as the adults in the room say yes smoking is very bad, bad, bad. Lets spend billions trying to convince our children do not smoke. However, let's pretend that marijuana is medicine and so now smoking it is not bad. Excuse me but i believe we all have the same lungs. Look at a map and the MAJORITY of the world calls marijuana illegal and does not condone it's sale in cannabis shops. Most of Europe and the Scandinavian countries do not allow it but do allow some medical marijuana use. Could they possibly know something we don't???
Why when we see the horrid damage being done in our country already from the illicit use of drugs and the over use of prescribed drugs need to add another drug to our cabinet. Did we not learn our lesson from alcohol. You might say banning it did not work and I agree it did not stop alcoholism. But we did learn about the immense damage it has caused and continues to cause in families, individuals and our hospitals. So lets add another potential hazard, let also make it legal sounds logical to me !!!!
It takes billons of dollars and years of research to get some of the actual drugs we now have to treat our diseases and illness legal and approved . There is no such thing as this level of peer reviewed research data available for cannabis yet. The advocates of course say there is but look at some and you will immediately see conflict of interest. I again agree there is conflict of interest easily seen in the history behind the granting of FDA approval but there is still years of research being done. Maybe we are just giving in because the states look at the dollar signs. After all why not try to tap into the previous black market of drugs. Some actually advocate legalizing all drugs. They now understand you will never eliminate the black market, especially when you continue to make it legal. Could the adults find their way back into the room after they see the horrific effects that all drugs have caused, this is just another we do not need.
Let me add that, everything else being equal, I consider it an affirmative good when the state stays out of our lives and "lets" us make our own decisions. Should pot be regulated to keep it out of the hands of young people? I think so, at least until we learn its consequences for brain development. Is it possible to over-use pot? Like every other substance on the face of the earth, yes. But that militates in favor of greater public information and not prohibition.
I lived in Denver when weed was legalized. First it destroyed downtown. It attracted all the wrong kinds - homeless/addicted moved there in droves. My son’s 13 year old friends sat at my kitchen table and told me weed is harmless (there goes all the good the DARE program did). Now we have the walking (fentanyl) dead and homeless encampments. So fun.
Couple of comments.
1. Whoever is over 50 years old should not really have a say. If you experimented marijuana back in your youth, the products currently available are way more potent than what you smoked. So no, it is not harmless.
2. There is no doubt excessive usage can trigger schizophrenia, and especially among teenage boys. The pro marijuana may judge the risk small, just go and talk to parents who have now schizophrenic kids . I have 2 close examples in my family and circle of friends . The young men will never come back to normal and have been living like zombie since then with the need to be supported at all times by their family and community.
3. I live in NYC. The smell of marijuana is now at every corner of the city. Especially in Times Square. Again this is the tyranny of the minority. For the 10-20% who want to smoke marijuana at any time of the day and any place, the rest of the population has to bow.
Weed exacerbates mental illness, and should not be legal. A literal opiate of the masses, that erodes effort, and creates unbridled complacency.
The statement that, "It is essentially impossible to overdose on marijuana" is patently false. I am a pediatric hospitalist and I have taken care of teens who have had psychotic breaks or presented with seizures from marijuana use. I am also seeing toddlers and young children who come in with seizures and altered mental status from ingesting a stray gummie that looks an awful lot like candy. Persistent vomiting from habitual marijuana use in teens is common. Last year, I took care of a baby who stopped breathing. We cannot definitely prove causation but mom was using THC for anxiety and breastfeeding the baby.
I am not opposed to marijuana use in consenting adults but decriminalization has not been good for children's health.
The problem isn't weed. The problem is a failed education system and the disintegration of the family.
We commonly confuse association with causation. Cannabis use is likely one of many markers of a far more generalized failure of a society more than a cause of it. When parents, families, schools, governments, and media all fail in their responsibilities pathology becomes the norm. That void creates a market for every stupid compulsive behavior humans can conceive. Parents who failed to engender self-sufficiency, mental toughness, and accountability in their offspring have spawned hordes of dysfunctional beings prone to jump into one rabbit hole after another , a failure amplified and abetted by society's feckless foundational institutions. Whether pathologic dependence on social media, gaming obsessions, sexual obsession, identity extremism, or drugs, it all originates in the same place: horribly inadequate humans incapable of strength. As long as people's reason to exist can be reduced to limbic dopamine surges , there will be ever-growing demands for sensate triggers to stimulate the pleasure centers of their non-cortical brains.
where
I believe the basic question is different. The tradeoff is between the effects of the drug and the effects of arrest/incarceration. Also the tremendous burden of expense on the police as well as taxpayers. Certainly there is harm from the drug in some cases, there is 100% certainly that there is harm from the effects of criminalizing it. There can be no controlled study of criminalizing it. If people are passionate about making it illegal why aren't they equally passionate or more passionate about eliminating alcohol use? If prohibition didn't work for alcohol why believe it will work for Marijuana when it didn't work before? Eventually the government will make sure that all marijuana is legally taxed. Maybe not in our lifetime but soon.
Even before I read Katherine Mangu-Ward's rebuttal, the flaws in this column were so painfully obvious. Barr & Walters enjoy their cocktail parties but cannot justify (morally, constitutionally, or financially) the expenditure of millions of taxpayer dollars to prosecute, incarcerate and ruin the lives of people whose "crime" is that they prefer the dreamy creativeness of toking to the slobbering tipsiness of drinking. Either they should advocate that we outlaw alcohol and tobacco, or they should at least begin their statements with "I know I am a total hypocrite, but I believe...."
There's been a raft of studies that connect high potency marijuana with schizophrenia in young men. Zero mention of that in the article except for a hasty hand wave: "there is now a vigorous debate about how to separate correlation from causation when it comes to the relationship between marijuana use and mental illness".
Two thoughts:
1. Weed should be legal at all levels, full stop. Given that alcohol is legal, it’s hypocritical to criminalize weed.
2. HOWEVER, we need to put weed in the same bucket as alcohol. It’s fun, it’s recreational, it is NOT medicine! And just like society is not responsible if you drink too much, neither is society responsible if you’re high all the time. We need to stop trying to legislate away stupidity.
Whatever the arguments for or against, there is no space for weed in cities. Nowadays, the noxious smell gets everywhere, including apartment buildings and green spaces. Being able to breathe normal air is a fundamental human right.
I live in Michigan and voted to legalize weed. I’ve regretted it ever since. It’s made Michigan smelly, you can’t go to a high school basketball or football game without sitting in a stench of skunk. When you’re driving down the road on a nice spring day with your windows down and that’s all you can smell it’s disgusting. Dispensaries everywhere. My son was in a car accident where a woman ran a light and hit him and reeked of weed at the scene. Was anything done? Nope.
Everyone should Google “Menominee, MI and weed” and see what these pot companies are doing.
Also, someone at the Free Press should do a deep dive on these pot companies. They do a full court press in the towns they want to put their stores in and try to get people to vote it in. Even if the town votes it down it has to be by a large margin (Maybe 75%) and if it’s lower they can keep pestering the town and eventually bring a lawsuit to force the town to accept it. A town called Rochester near Detroit just went through this. Thankfully enough residents voted it down.
I live in Tennessee and no weed is legal here. The smell is everywhere. You smell it driving down I40. Everywhere.
What happened to all the adults in the room. It started when the constant pressure of the "Make Weed Legal" leaders made a brilliant business move and said nobody is against a medicine that can help people. Lets do some dubious research and eventually with papers in hand snowed enough people to have it be called MEDICAL / Medicinal marijuana and crowed it is desperately needed to help people. So that opened the door exactly the way they wanted, just get that foot in the door. Yes just what America needed. America the most pill taking and drug taking group of people on earth. Fast forward the learning curve and eventually the real damage of smoking got to the people and look how smoking is viewed today. The health cost alone beside the cost to individuals, companies and families from the damage caused by smoking is staggering. So let us as the adults in the room say yes smoking is very bad, bad, bad. Lets spend billions trying to convince our children do not smoke. However, let's pretend that marijuana is medicine and so now smoking it is not bad. Excuse me but i believe we all have the same lungs. Look at a map and the MAJORITY of the world calls marijuana illegal and does not condone it's sale in cannabis shops. Most of Europe and the Scandinavian countries do not allow it but do allow some medical marijuana use. Could they possibly know something we don't???
Why when we see the horrid damage being done in our country already from the illicit use of drugs and the over use of prescribed drugs need to add another drug to our cabinet. Did we not learn our lesson from alcohol. You might say banning it did not work and I agree it did not stop alcoholism. But we did learn about the immense damage it has caused and continues to cause in families, individuals and our hospitals. So lets add another potential hazard, let also make it legal sounds logical to me !!!!
It takes billons of dollars and years of research to get some of the actual drugs we now have to treat our diseases and illness legal and approved . There is no such thing as this level of peer reviewed research data available for cannabis yet. The advocates of course say there is but look at some and you will immediately see conflict of interest. I again agree there is conflict of interest easily seen in the history behind the granting of FDA approval but there is still years of research being done. Maybe we are just giving in because the states look at the dollar signs. After all why not try to tap into the previous black market of drugs. Some actually advocate legalizing all drugs. They now understand you will never eliminate the black market, especially when you continue to make it legal. Could the adults find their way back into the room after they see the horrific effects that all drugs have caused, this is just another we do not need.
Let me add that, everything else being equal, I consider it an affirmative good when the state stays out of our lives and "lets" us make our own decisions. Should pot be regulated to keep it out of the hands of young people? I think so, at least until we learn its consequences for brain development. Is it possible to over-use pot? Like every other substance on the face of the earth, yes. But that militates in favor of greater public information and not prohibition.
What